The Chickens Have Come Home to RoostBy: Richard Poe FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 20, 2001

MALCOLM X ONCE SHOCKED a grieving world by calling President Kennedy’s assassination a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." In recent days, some leftwing writers have revived the phrase. We have been forced to hold our noses as one "progressive" pundit after another has lined up to inform us that last week’s terror was but another instance of America’s evil backfiring upon itself.

Who knows? Maybe the chickens really have come home to roost. But not the way those pundits think.

David Horowitz’s new pamphlet,Progressive Crime Wave, was shipped from the printer before last week’s atrocities occurred. Yet, with chilling prescience, it catalogues the dismantling of America’s defenses moral, military and societal which ultimately left us helpless before the howling storms of Third-World chaos now filling our television screens.

Yet as the reader proceeds from one hair-raising exposé to the next, the common strand grows clear. In each case, Horowitz has documented a deliberate, calculated and well-organized effort by the Left to break down the safeguards of society to transform America, step by step, from a peaceful, prosperous First-World nation into a nightmare land wracked by epidemic disease, uncontrolled street crime, political persecution, Balkanesque racial violence and apocalyptic military threats.

If life in America seems coarser, deadlier and more violent than before, Horowitz implies if it seems more like Bosnia or Rwanda than a Norman Rockwell painting this is no accident. The self-styled "progressives" among us applaud our descent into hell. Indeed, they have done all in their power to facilitate it.

What happened last week in New York and Washington is but a logical escalation of the "progressive crime wave" Horowitz documents.

The connection between Jesse Jackson-style race-baiting and catastrophic terrorism may seem thin, at first glance. But the disparate strands of Horowitz’s thesis weave together with diabolical precision in the next-to-last essay, which tells the story of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-born scientist accused of leaking nuclear secrets from Los Alamos.

Here we see the sinister machinery of political correctness grind into action not merely to persecute some hapless sophomore accused of groping his drunken date but this time to effect its true and larger purpose: stripping America of its fundamental ability to survive.

Most of us who followed the story in the mainstream press got the impression that Wen Ho Lee was falsely accused, that the FBI disgraced itself by leading a witch hunt.

The truth is more disturbing. A Congressional committee headed by Rep. Chris Cox reported in May 1999 that, "The espionage inquiry found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles and guidance systems."

The FBI fingered Lee as a suspect. But the press flew to his rescue, led by influentialLos Angeles Timescolumnist Robert Scheer. A committed leftist whose first book had celebrated Castro’s revolution, and who had once been an ardent disciple of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Scheer bluntly accused the FBI of racial profiling. He wrote:

The Chinaman did it. The diabolical Asian has long been a staple of American racism, and it’s not surprising that the folks attempting to whip up a new red espionage scare would focus on Wen Ho Lee.

As so often happens when the charge of "racial profiling" is raised, the government backed down, dropping 58 of the 59 charges against Lee. Then-President Clinton offered an apology.

Yet, FBI director Louis Freeh insisted, "The Department of Justice and the FBI stand by each and every one of the 59 counts in the indictment of Dr. Lee. Each of those counts could be proved in December 1999 [when Lee was indicted], and each of them could be proven today."

With the World Trade Center reduced to a smoking graveyard, it remains to be seen whether Americans have finally had their fill of the "progressive crime wave."

Even now, "progressive" voices can be heard cautiously muttering against the profiling of Muslim travelers in airports. Any well-meaning souls tempted to heed those voices would do well to read David Horowitz’s Progressive Crime Wavefirst.

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